One week, no food S Abbas Raza | Aeon | 1 May 2013 Couple fast for seven days. Water only. No dramatic outcomes, at least in physical terms, but a distant effect on mental performance: “My reactions were slowed down very noticeably by evening. If my wife asked me a question, it took about five seconds for it to register and another five before I could formulate and deliver a reply”. Biggest surprise: the amount of time freed up by no meals and much less shopping.

The autistic brain Temple Grandin | Slate | 1 May 2013 Book extract. “In 1947, the diagnosis of autism was only four years old. Almost nobody knew what it meant. When Mother noticed in me the symptoms that we would now label autistic – destructive behaviour, inability to speak, a sensitivity to physical contact, a fixation on spinning objects, and so on – she did what made sense to her. She took me to a neurologist. The diagnosis: brain damage.”

Where uniqueness lies Gary Marcus | Nautilus | 29 April 2013 Advances in genetics, biology, neuroscience, anthropology, tend to point up how similar humans are to other animals, not how different. Whatever sets us apart, it isn’t very much. “Humans will never abandon the quest to prove that they are special. But nor can we escape the fact that our minds are a modest tweak on an ancient plan that originated millions of years before we came onto the scene.

Home away from home Nick Carr | Rough Type | 29 April 2013 What Facebook reveals about itself through its advertising. It pretends to be about connection, but it’s really about distraction, alienation. The contradiction is out there in the open. Facebook knows it is living a lie, and it doesn’t care. The corporate spirit is cynical, nihilistic. “For Zuckerberg, and for Facebook, ‘sincere’ and ‘insincere’ are equally meaningless terms. Everything is bullshit.”

Who can stop these adorable pigs? Jesse Hirsch | Modern Farmer | 25 April 2013 Feral pigs are over-running America. Radioactive feral pigs are threatening Europe. Destroying crops, spreading diseases. “Once a wild pig is full-grown, it is invulnerable to almost all forms of predators — angry alligators being one possible exception”. Boars are smart, fast, hard to hunt. “We’re not going to shoot or trap our way out of this. Lethal removal just doesn’t take the numbers that you need to control the population.”

Yudhijit Bhattacharjee | New York Times | 26 April 2013 Admired Dutch psychologist admits to faking a whole career’s worth of academic research. “Everybody wants you to be novel and creative, but you also need to be truthful and likely. You need to be able to say that this is completely new and exciting, but it’s very likely given what we know so far”

The debt to pleasure Anonymous | The Economist | 26 April 2013 Discussion of a paper from Nobel-prize-winning economist Daniel McFadden, arguing that, to understand consumer choice, we need a “new science of pleasure” incorporating psychology, neuroscience and anthropology. Economics has taken too narrow a view: Human decision-making isn’t all about self-interest and revealed preferences. It is shaped by memory, experience, mood, trust, and brain chemistry.

What if we never run out of oil? Charles Mann | The Atlantic | 24 April 2013 Fracking and shale gas have transformed America’s energy balance. In another decade, led by Japan, we may well be recovering natural gas – methane hydrate – from beneath the oceans, tapping reserves perhaps twice as big as all other fossil fuels combined. In short, humanity may well have all the fossil fuels it can possibly use for lifetimes to come. Which would be great news – if not for climate change.

How not to die Jonathan Rauch | The Atlantic | 24 April 2013 Humbling, enlightening essay on end-of-life care. “Unwanted treatment is American medicine’s dark continent. No one knows its extent, and few people want to talk about it. The US medical system was built to treat anything that might be treatable, at any stage of life – even near the end, when there is no hope of a cure, and when the patient, if fully informed, might prefer quality time and relative normalcy to all-out intervention.”

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